Let’s cover this again. ProRAW is a video format, not a stills format. Does not apply to Photolab. HEIC has potential on paper but Apple for now is only using HEIC to create smaller files not better:
- Converting your files with iMazing HEIC converter comes at no quality penalty.
- Shooting in JPEG comes at no quality penalty (does take about 50% more space. but offloading or deleting non-keeper images solves the space issue).
Finally HEIC licensing is extremely expensive for small commercial software houses. Apple is a member of the HEIC patent pool so enjoy preferable terms. There are upper limits on royalties which are documented at least $65 million/year. For Apple, Samsung, Adobe or Microsoft, sums like that are chump change well-spent to keep others out of the club. Patent licensing with caps a great barrier to keep smaller companies from poaching on what the big tech companies consider chasse gardée. To make sure the FOSS community buys in and supports these codecs, those developers get limited free licenses.
By asking Photolab to include HEIC, you are asking them to slit their own throats by funding the big companies with their profitability. Out of that €75 upgrade, €17 already goes in taxes. Another minimum of 0.60¢ would go in HEIC royalties. That’s one format. As more get added, format royalties could easily reach €5/copy for smaller publishers.
As end users we all benefit long-term from unencumbered formats. We all suffer from encumbered proprietary formats. Photolab’s stance on the issue is intellectually and ethically coherent. The workarounds are trivial in this case.
In terms of supporting Apple silicon, I’m sure Photolab is just waiting for the dust to settle on the new processor architecture and its coding tools. Rushing in, making a huge expense just to see Apple turn the tools and programming API upside down twice over the first three years would be imprudent. I expect the “Rosetta” version will run just fine.
I’m more concerned that the current version is not particularly well-optimised for Mac OS X. The GPU is only used in DeepPrime. Actually it looks like the GPU is used in Photolab 4 for adjusting images and performance is much smoother. It looks like Photolab has deployed the C1 system I recommended of creating proxy files and showing changes on them. Lag on preview is significantly lower on Fit to Screen previews than 1:1 previews (but those are better too).
So GPU acceleration and faster performance on Mac have arrived. Fantastic. Just a pity that Photolab made the unfortunate decision to exclude High Sierra OS (the last which can be run on MBP 2011, themselves the last 17 inch Mac laptops and the last with non-glare screens). HEIC support is really not an issue (and like you I own an iPhone 11 Pro Max). Export to jpeg and tweak in Photolab works quite well for me (sample panoramas).
DxO should be supporting Apple RAW formats though. Currently I use Iridient Developer on Apple RAW photo files. My tests show that Apple’s internal algorithms produce better results with no time spent 90% over careful RAW processing. I prefer to spend my darkroom time on real RAW files from my Nikon than trying to outfox Apple with mediocre smart phone RAW. The reason that Apple processing is so much better than third party cameraapp makers RAW is that Apple takes several photos and combines them in post. The third party cameras can only take a single photo at a time. It’s a race they are pre-destined to lose. Still - Photolab should allow us to try to process our iPhone (and Android) RAW files.